Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short range radio technology which is preferably based on the inductive coupling of two loop antennae resonating at 13.56 MHz. Typical data rates are in the range of 100 to 400 Kbps, and communication distance is in the range of several centimeters. Typical applications include secure transactions for payment and ticketing. Secure NFC applications require the addition to the system of one or more security chips to hold sensitive information, like Credit Card numbers, transportation system subscriptions, etc. Security chips include some non volatile storage capacity. Those security chips may be accessed through interfaces and protocols which are for example defined by the standards ETSI 102613/102622. NFC applications can be of several types, for example peer to peer applications, or read and write applications, or card emulation applications.
More and more NFC devices are to be integrated with other wireless communication units into communication devices, like combined connectivity devices, for example into mobile phones. Those other wireless communication units may be for example Bluetooth, FM Radio, and/or GNSS location, which may be integrated with a NFC function, altogether in the same chip. To perform the NFC function correctly, some configuration parameters of the NFC function will need to be stored in a persistent way, which means in a non volatile storage capacity.
According to a first prior art, since the state of the art technologies used to implement these wireless units do not provide cost effective ways to implement on-chip non volatile storage, dedicated external storage peripherals, for example an EEPROM, are often used to store these NFC function configuration parameters. However this dedicated external storage peripheral involves extra cost and extra complexity to the communication device including it.
According to a second prior art, for example described in US 2008/155258, it is known a memory module including a NFC component, a security processor, and several flash memories. However, in this second prior art, all flash memories are accessed through the security processor. So none of available non volatile memories of this prior art is efficient since it requires access under the control of security processor, and NFC function configuration parameters need to be accessed before being able to start communicating with the security processor. Besides, the memory module is not a security chip since it does include a NFC component.
According to a third prior art, for example described in US 2008/155257, it is known a memory module including a NFC component, a security processor, and several non volatile memories. However, in this third prior art, all non volatile memories are accessed through the security processor. The only memory, which is not accessed through the security processor, is a volatile memory. So none of available non volatile memories of this prior art is efficient since it requires access under the control of security processor, and NFC function configuration parameters need to be accessed before being able to start communicating with the security processor. The only directly accessible memory is not efficient either, since it is not adapted to store information which needs to be kept even when the communication device is off. Besides, the memory module is not a security chip since it does include a NFC component.